“Not Too Busy Now” Accountability Group

It’s time to finally learn that thing you we’re always too busy to learn

Is there something you’ve always said you wanted to learn – play a musical instrument, learn another language, take up a sport – but were always too busy to do?

Guess what?

You’re not too busy now.

Why not use this time to reach out to your company or organization (perhaps your HR department) or even just a group of friends or family, or form a new group of friends on Facebook, where you will form an “Not Too Busy Now Accountability Group,” and where each week you meet online to support and root for each other in learning that new skill.

If you’ve read any of my blogs, you know I’m a fan of adding a neuroscience explanation to what I discuss to help make the case for it.

Forming a “Not Too Busy Accountability Group” will help you get through this crisis in a number of ways:

Oxytocin will counterbalance high cortisol and adrenaline – When you’re under stress and worse, distress, your body puts out high levels of cortisol and adrenaline to deal with it. Those chemicals then have a way of pushing your brain and mind into a survival mode, which is okay in the short run. However, that can cause you to become brittle and fearful in the long run. Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, counteracts this and this shared online activity will increase it.

Dopamine is associated with pleasure. Not only will meeting and belonging to this group increase your bonding, but mutually supporting each to learn things you always wanted to learn (because you imagined that you’d find pleasure in them) will increase this pleasure hormone.

You can teach old dogs new tricks. Learning these new skills and abilities will have the additional benefit of proving to you that you can learn and maybe even master new competencies. This will have a positive feedback loop to the part of you that may have had anxieties about not being able to learn new things and demonstrate that you can learn to learn.